Friday, May 8, 2015

3-D Printed Gun Lawsuit Starts the War Between Gun Control and Free Speech

This week marks the two-year
anniversary since Cody Wilson, the inventor of the world’s first 3-D
printable gun, received a letter from the State Department demanding
that he remove the blueprints for his plastic-printed firearm from the
internet. The alternative: face possible prosecution for violating
regulations that forbid the international export of unapproved arms.

Now Wilson is challenging that letter. And in doing so, he’s picking a
fight that could pit proponents of gun control and defenders of free
speech against each other in an age when the line between a lethal
weapon and a collection of bits is blurrier than ever before.

Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along
with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday
filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its
officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint,
they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of
Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to
free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a
3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the
Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its
website.

It didn't work out for them the last time they invoked this law to restrict code,

"ITAR already has a long history of being used to threaten Americans who publish controversial code. In the 1990s, the same regulations were used to threaten cryptographers with prosecution for posting online the first freely available strong encryption tools. Under ITAR regulations, a piece of uncrackable crypto software like PGP was considered a military munition."

"The Justice Department eventually dropped that investigation without an indictment or an explanation. But before it did, the cryptographer Dan Bernstein sued the State Department, arguing that ITAR was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. He won."

And of course, its a bit slow on the draw on restricting Defense Distributed,

"Of course, the State Department’s two years of invoking ITAR against Defense Distributed haven’t prevented its 3-D printable gun files from spreading across the web. Instead, a Streisand-Effect-like fear of government censorship helped spur more than 100,000 downloads of the Liberator blueprint in two days. By the time the file was removed from Defense Distributed’s websites, it had already appeared on the Pirate Bay and other bittorrent sites, where it’s become nearly impossible to erase. And in the years since, amateur gunsmiths on sites like FOSSCad and GrabCAD have continued to evolve the Liberator’s design and share their own blueprints for 3-D printable revolvers and rifles."

Sure, the government can pass all the anti-free speech laws restricting the dissemination of such information it wants, and it's hardly inconceivable that the courts would let them get away with it.

And it doesn't matter. The information cannot be stopped. If it becomes "illegal" to post those files, they'll be anonymously leaked to off-shore bittorrent sties (as has already happened, as SSG has noted), and the statist crybabies are powerless to stop it.

Of course, the State Department’s two years of invoking ITAR against Defense Distributed haven’t prevented its 3-D printable gun files from spreading across the web. Instead, a Streisand-Effect-like fear of government censorship helped spur more than 100,000 downloads of the Liberator blueprint in two days.

And I'd wager that I was among the first thousand--certainly among the first ten thousand.

Surest way to get me to do something: try to prevent me from doing it.

FJ - Freedom of the press. He is not handing anyone a physical gun, he is imparting knowledge on how to make a gun. That is free expression. That would be like saying you can't publish the blueprints to a house you designed because someone else may take those blueprints and build a house from them without having to pay someone to draw the blueprints for them. This seems pretty clear cut to me.